Millions of sushi, sushi for me.
January 24, 2016 8:28 AM   Subscribe

 
What a neat way to embrace scale and reduce drudgery!
posted by The Whelk at 8:34 AM on January 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


I love the tone of voice of the narrator. He sounds like someone from the industrial films that they showed us in school in the '70s.
posted by octothorpe at 8:34 AM on January 24, 2016 [4 favorites]


If you are interested in conveyor belt sushi, you might also be interested in Uobei Sushi (youtube link). They have an automated system that delivers the tray of sushi directly to you, without a continuously moving belt.
posted by cruelfood at 8:41 AM on January 24, 2016


Oh Japan. Even your sushi restaurants are basically giant robots.
posted by Nelson at 8:49 AM on January 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


So, how do the prices at a conveyor-belt restaurant compare to a traditional sushi bar?
posted by Thorzdad at 9:06 AM on January 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


Do Android Jiros Dream of Electric Sushi?
posted by anazgnos at 9:12 AM on January 24, 2016 [9 favorites]


What's really fun is to watch this while keeping an eye out for all the human tasks that improved robotics will automate in the next few years.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:14 AM on January 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


...all the human tasks that improved robotics will automate in the next few years.

Once they get the robots to order and eat the sushi, they won't have to let any humans in the restaurant at all.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:17 AM on January 24, 2016 [4 favorites]


That's part of this Begin Japanology episode about conveyor belt sushi (begins around the 15:00 minutes mark).
posted by sukeban at 9:19 AM on January 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


Hey, down in the video links is an excellent video of a sushi chef, filleting a whole salmon. After my clumsy attempts, I have been waiting for this tutorial all my adult life. (several clumsy spelling attempts.)
posted by Oyéah at 9:22 AM on January 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


Is that a table-side tea dispenser?
posted by humboldt32 at 9:30 AM on January 24, 2016


Yes - actually, a hot water dispenser. Green tea bags (or even little boxes of powdered matcha) will be available near-by.

how do the prices at a conveyor-belt restaurant compare to a traditional sushi bar?

Much cheaper.
posted by Rash at 9:34 AM on January 24, 2016 [3 favorites]


I love these places, but here in Silicon Valley they're usually gussied-up into the sushi boat, which means the conveyor belt has been replaced with a trough of flowing water, which pushes along little wooden boats carrying the sushi. Eagerly awaiting the opening of Kula kaitenzushi in Cupertino, which should be the real thing.

For a while there (previously) we had a flurry of videos where tourists were placing their cameras on the belt, retrieving it after a circuit and posting the result -- here's an example.
posted by Rash at 9:45 AM on January 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


I realize that this is not the best sushi in the world, but man, I still want to try it so very, very much.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:48 AM on January 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


A note that this is not all of the conveyor belt places in Japan. I ate a couple of these while I was there and it was a single guy inside the belt making sushi, and one or two people outside to clear plates and ring people up. Worked really great for settling an upset stomach, actually. Not the greatest sushi, but I think it was ¥170 a plate (about $1.50). Maybe ¥270 a plate. Either way, totally worth it.
posted by Hactar at 9:56 AM on January 24, 2016


It looks a lot like grocery store sushi here in the US. Not terribly well-cut or molded, but still - it is sushi. Is it cold? If not, that gives it one huge leg up over grocery store sushi.
posted by rtimmel at 10:09 AM on January 24, 2016


Somebody with a talent for BBQ and an old hay bale elevator rusting behind the barn just had an idea.
posted by hal9k at 10:19 AM on January 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'd like to see this in a massive space, using a hilbert curve for the path of the conveyor.
posted by idiopath at 10:30 AM on January 24, 2016 [3 favorites]


It's not like grocery store sushi at all, but entirely OK. Heck, even the grocery store sushi in Japan is something completely different from that in the US or Europe. (I miss Japanese 7/11 every day)
posted by mumimor at 10:43 AM on January 24, 2016 [3 favorites]


The places I've been to in the U.S. have been cheaper than an equivalent sushi restaurant and the quality just as good. There are still chefs making it fresh on site, and, in my experience, you can still get things made to order. If you're into American-style rolls with 7 ingredients per roll, though, you're not likely to find those.
posted by tofu_crouton at 11:02 AM on January 24, 2016


they should revere the polarities on the magnet one and have the sushi delivered on hoverboards :P efficiently conveyed from the sea to my belly!
posted by kliuless at 11:11 AM on January 24, 2016


I've seen ones in the US where the only stuff you can get is whatever passes around the belt, which is not as good.

The Japanese kind usually have a touchscreen or something to order, and either it comes around on the belt with your table number or, at at least one place, a separate little track system sends a little delivery train to your table directly. There are also just random sushi you can get too, if you happen to see an unmarked one go by you want. I've never seen one with an automatic plate return like this, but thats pretty neat.

The US ones are a little more expensive on average. The one I've been to the most in Japan is pretty good quality (I mean not amazing, but better than I was used to from here) and 100 yen a plate, which is $0.84 in USD. So like 40 cents per piece of sushi.
posted by thefoxgod at 11:51 AM on January 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


I watched this thinking, "Wow, that's cool. Oh wow, that is so cool. Something's nagging at me about dystopian something-something but man, this is so cool."

Then they got to the part about the video cameras that constantly monitor the 120 restaurant locations, which can serve 196 patrons at a single time (so, let's say they're watching 24,000 people at any given moment), and then the button-down guy in HQ picks up the phone to remotely chastise a kitchen worker about an order that's been sitting too long and I was like "Oh, right, this feels dystopian because it is pretty literally what Orwell had in mind with 'Big Brother.'"

(It's still pretty cool, though.)

Also, the Begin Japanology series is totally awesome and available in HD on YouTube. Highly recommended. No fluff.
posted by mudpuppie at 11:55 AM on January 24, 2016 [6 favorites]


in Silicon Valley they're usually gussied-up into the sushi boat, which means the conveyor belt has been replaced with a trough of flowing water, which pushes along little wooden boats carrying the sushi

I once ate at a (chain, I think) sushi restaurant in Brisbane, Australia, which had a large-scale model train set for its sushi conveyor belt. There was a track running around the kitchen/staff area, on which a model locomotive about the size of a cat pulled a train of flat-bed trailers carrying the familiar colour-coded plates. For some reason, though, it was a model of an American locomotive (a Union Pacific one, I think); presumably they bought the train set off the shelf and it didn't have Japanese locomotives (or local Australian ones, for that matter) as an option.
posted by acb at 11:55 AM on January 24, 2016


The quality can vary a lot. There are several national chains that are basically fast food - mass-produced but cheap and satisfying. There are also nicer places that are more expensive, but someone is making everything by hand with high-quality ingredients. Conveyor belt sushi in Hokkaido, for example, is in general totally awesome and better than just about anything you could get in the U.S.

The industry continues to evolve, with new gimmicks like slot machines when you return plates, strange and new food options, and high-speed rails. Just for fun, here's a conveyor belt yakiniku restaurant, and a robot sushi restaurant in Bangkok.
posted by mshrike at 12:05 PM on January 24, 2016


Aesthetic: that nightmarish underground café from Cloud Atlas.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 12:22 PM on January 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


Blue C Sushi (Seattle and now LA) just freaking rocks if you have kids. Food immediately upon sitting down! Robots delivering your order! Awesome video projections of weird Japanese things! Cotton candy machine and cupcakes! Kids are melting down, time to leave -- instant check!

The quality is *adequate* and there are too many rolls that include things like bacon, but it's cheap and it avoids nearly every peril of eating out with children.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 2:45 PM on January 24, 2016


yeah, there's a running sushi place here that is in every way offensive and I hate the food, but with kids, it's amazing. And as I see it, it's healthier than most fast-food places.
posted by mumimor at 2:51 PM on January 24, 2016


Even for the nationwide chains, the quality really depends on the chain. Hama-zushi and Kappa-zushi are cheap and taste cheap. Sushiro is good and cheap and I feel guilty eating there because something isn't right that they're able to provide the quality they do at the prices they do.
posted by Bugbread at 3:40 PM on January 24, 2016


The dishwashing tunnel was the most amazing part for me. I'd like a Home of the Future that has intake slots like that.
posted by ignignokt at 5:27 PM on January 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


From the video at 0m33s: "There are actually no chefs. Everything is automated." -> Voiced while showing video of an actual person assembling sushi.
posted by funkiwan at 6:40 PM on January 24, 2016


I suspect that's a fuzzy terminology issue. There is no sushi chef, in the sense that the machine does the most important part of a chef's job. It's like...well, like if you microwave a frozen burrito you wouldn't say that you "made a burrito", even though technically you did stuff that involved heating the burrito and which was required to eat it. Likewise you wouldn't call someone a "chef" just for cutting an apple in half or peeling an orange. Since the hard parts of making sushi are the fish selection, cutting, rice preparation, and rice packing, and the placing of the fish is the easiest part, I'd concur that the folks placing the fish on top of the rice are not "chefs".
posted by Bugbread at 8:14 PM on January 24, 2016


Japan giveth, and Japan taketh away.
posted by king walnut at 9:00 PM on January 24, 2016


I've been to Hot-Pot place like this in Nanjing China. It was a flat fee for all you can eat and all the beer you could drink. Such a fun evening!
posted by Confess, Fletch at 9:48 PM on January 24, 2016


sukeban: “That's part of this Begin Japanology episode about conveyor belt sushi (begins around the 15:00 minutes mark).”
Here's a link to that same BEGIN Japanology which will work in America.
posted by ob1quixote at 2:14 AM on January 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


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